Hanna Megged
One of best-known Israeli abstract painters.
Hanna Megged was born in Hevron in 1926 and in 1929 moved with her family to Jerusalem, where she grew up. She served in Hapalmach and then married Matti Megged and moved with him to Seminar Oraneem, where she studied art with Marcel Yanko and with Jacob Wexler. After separating from her husband in 1976 she moved to Tel Aviv, where she lived until her death in 2010.
Hanna Megged | Painting as Living Humanism
For over five decades, Hanna Megged cultivated a consistent and deeply personal artistic path, marked by a steadfast commitment to her humanistic and liberal worldview. Her work, rooted in the landscapes of Israel, was never just about place it was about spirit, emotion, and values. From her first solo exhibition at Eked Gallery in 1960, Megged went on to present numerous solo and group shows in leading institutions, including Dugit Gallery, the Haifa Museum of Modern Art, Gimmel Gallery in Jerusalem, Tova Osman Gallery, Beit Ha’Omanim in Tel Aviv, the Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art, and many more.
Megged’s paintings are immediately recognizable by their bold color choices hues that may at first seem to clash, yet are brought into harmony through careful compositional order. Her control over visual tension reflects an inner discipline and poetic restraint. She was especially drawn to figurative abstraction as a way to express her deep connection to the Israeli landscape, which she rendered in rich layers of Mediterranean color, evoking both the physical and emotional terrain of the region.
Her paintings resonate with quiet elegance a beauty that is both intellectual and intuitive, expressive yet refined. In every work, Megged invites the viewer into a space where form, color, and conviction coalesce. Her art stands as a powerful visual testament to her belief that painting is not only a craft, but a form of moral and spiritual expression a living humanism.
Curator: Sorin Heller
Review
Hannah Megged's present exhibition summarizes three years of creativity, 2001-2004. This is a series of crystallized acrylic paintings on canvas in a relatively large format. These paintings are a continuation of Megged's preoccupation with the abstraction of landscape and the translation of actual forms into the values of painting.
Megged persists in the approach she has developed over more than 50 years of abstraction by a calculated drawing scheme in which the final product. The painting may be called "cultural," perhaps even "beautiful," which today, in an era where the differences between high and low art are blurred, may seem anachronistic, borrowed from another era, modernism.
Megged does not hide it. The opposite is correct. She clarifies the field of artistic work she deals with, the language of abstraction. And she adds to this, she focuses the painting on a familiar dialectic, already tried and formulated by artists such as Rothko, of the concept of abstraction as a metaphysical conductor, of a hidden secret, a puzzle that accompanies the work. And perhaps also awe on the handsome side, "sublime" in romantic terms. In terms of the means of painting, Megged chooses colors that at first glance look "grating," forcing them to "order," organizing the composition, and harmony. Compared to the previous paintings, the series is characterized by great materiality, layers of color, and almost impasto. But at the same time the point of encounter between the surfaces of color, the mountain, and the sky, for example, creates a line of tension, and concentration. In many cases, the confluence reveals the lower layer, transparent in relation to the materiality of the other color surfaces, the opening that recalls Rothko-Megged's paintings does not hide it. It seems that she does not attach importance to stations in the history of modern art.
What exists for her is painting, blunt, safe, and fun. In the eyes of the series is a summary of her work in a large format. It reaches the perfection of the process of abstraction, of mastery of the painting process, but also of "elegant" strokes. She manages to create a well-made, powerful painting. Perseverance, control, and security make her painting relevant, today, a kind of anchor in a culture of painting, a kind of small, non-vociferous demonstration, about the need to paint, how to paint, the statement of the artist who devoted herself to the work.
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Mr. Reuel Megged
Telephone: +972 77-9118880
Mobile: +972 50-6622212
E-mail: reuelmegged@gmail.com
